Local Grassroots Movements - Best Practices, Sharing, etc.

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We've made a change on C&NN Connect and want to be sure you stay connected!

Please take a few minutes to join the Local Grassroots Campaign Coordinators group on C&NN Connect. That is our place to share success stories, confer about challenges, seek answers, find support, spark ideas and move the movement!

Even if you were a member of this group, you will need to sign yourself up for the new Grassroots group.

This will allow all of the news and sharing about our Grassroots efforts to occur in one place. To avoid any confusion, this group will be removed.

We look forward to continuing the conversation!

This is a group for people who are in leadership in their local grassroots movements: Collaboratives, initiatives, etc. Here we can share what is going on in different locations in order to help each other and spark ideas!

Discussion Forum

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Read the latest news from the Ohio Grassroots. Their five regional Leave No Child Inside collaboratives have been very active and productive. I think you'll be inspired, as I was, by their accomplishments.

Help with community collaborations. At the Gathering earlier this month, a group of us met at dinner to discuss community collaborations for children and nature. Specifically, several of us had found that we were experiencing similar challenges after two or three years of our efforts, and hoped that we could collectively share and discover solutions.

Although each collaboration is unique to its metro area or state, there seem to be common issues surfacing as the efforts began to mature:
- a softening of the initial enthusiasm and commitment of the core
leaders, as the necessary time commitment takes its toll;
- difficulty in spreading the leadership and development load from the
original champions to a larger group of leaders, without losing
momentum;
- limited financial resources, exacerbated by the economic downtown
and sometimes quiet turf issues among participating organizations;
- indecision about the best organizational structure(s) for advancing
and expanding the efforts; and
- difficulty in effectively engaging various elements of the community,
be it the health sector, formal education, outdoor retailers, etc.

Ultimately, we decided to ask C&NN to produce a companion volume to the original Community Action Guide, to address typical challenges and strategies for years three to six. Hopefully this product will emerge, but in the meanwhile perhaps we can start to help each other through discussion in this forum.

My own local collaboration is Metro Omaha Resources for Exploring Nature. Besides a great acronym (MORE Nature), we have had some notable successes during our first 2.5 years:
- an on-going series of “Nature Nights” at local schools;
- an on-going series of “Nature Play Workshops for Parents;”
- a community forum with good attendance that included numerous
local decision leaders;
- a good website (www.morenature.info);
- a partnership with the Junior League of Omaha in starting and
continuing “Go Play Adventure” ― a family treasure hunt to local
parks and other outdoor play destinations;
- funding support for the booklet “A Parents’ Guide to Nature Play”
produced by my own organization, Green Hearts
(www.greenheartsinc.org);
- and a demonstration nature play yard we developed this summer as
part of Omaha’s annual, two-week-long “Street of Dreams” homes
tour.

In sum, we feel very good about our accomplishments. Yet we are struggling to take MORE Nature to the next level ― i.e., to reach a sort of tipping point that will allow us to begin having dramatically more impact. Our chief financial and staffing sponsor, the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District, remains solid in their support and leadership, and several other influential organizations are represented on our steering committee: the Omaha Children’s Museum, the Henry Doorly Zoo, the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission, the Omaha Association for the Education of Young Children, Lauritzen Gardens, Green Hearts, and Hitchcock Nature Center, plus we have the assistance of a couple of excellent individual volunteers.

However, we are struggling to connect to the health community; to identify and develop new leaders; to establish the necessary credibility and influence for much more community financial support; and in deciding whether we should move beyond our current, loose-knit organizational structure to something more formal and concrete.

I am hoping that those of you who are involved in your own community collaborations will share your ideas and successes with these and other challenges, and will help identify and address other problems that you are encountering in your own efforts. Together we can be stronger. Thanks!

at the meeting in co, someone mentioned that they had served as a guest editor for a magazine issue which focused on connecting kids & nature. does anyone remember who mentioned that? i'd love to find out more!